"There are so many people that want data centers," President Donald Trump declared Tuesday during a meeting with AI CEOs. But while the administration has championed the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, recent polls suggest many Americans are wary of the massive facilities being built to power the technology. Polls from Gallup and the Pew Research Center reveal that Americans have become significantly more negative about data centers over the last year, with communities sharing stories of hardship caused by the infrastructure and some Democratic lawmakers calling for a halt on construction of all artificial intelligence data centers.
Newsweek reached out to the White House via email for comment and is awaiting a response. On Tuesday, Trump met with tech CEOs to discuss the future of artificial intelligence, potential guardrails and even a name-change for the technology. During the meeting, the president signed an executive order directing federal agencies to stop using the terms "artificial intelligence" and "AI" in official communications, policy documents and correspondence, and to replace them with "Super Intelligence" and "SI." Trump also signed a voluntary accord alongside six key names in AI, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, xAI CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The document said that the signers vowed to advance their artificial intelligence models safely as safety concerns around the technology continue to grow. Speaking to the press during the event, the president then turned to data centers, claiming that Americans wanted them, and that they were about to become "very popular." "The areas with data centers have become very rich. Their taxes have gone down, not up.
And a lot of good things have happened," Trump said. "I think they’re going to do things for the community that will be really financially beneficial." While Trump appeared overwhelmingly positive about the future of data centers on Tuesday, polling shows that the American public may feel quite differently. In May this year, a Gallup poll of 1,000 U.S. adults found that 71 percent of Americans oppose construction of AI data centers in their local area.
Of these, 70 percent said they worry either a great deal or a fair amount about the environmental impact of AI data centers. Among reasons mentioned for opposing data centers in their local area, respondents cited effects on resources like water and energy, quality-of-life concerns, pollution and economic impact. More recently, a September poll by the Pew Research Center asked over 10,000 U.S. adults about data centers.
Of these, 60 percent said they would be uncomfortable with a new data center being built in their area. When it comes to how people see the impact of data centers, 50 percent said they believe they are mostly bad for home energy costs, 49 percent said they are bad for the quality of life of nearby residents and just 4 percent said they were good for the environment, energy costs or quality of life. Opponents of AI data center infrastructure staged 142 protests over 42 states in July this year in a coordinated effort to draw attention to concerns over the building.
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